Effects not so smooth anymore..

[someguy]

Today I stopped in the only "Apple Store" in my area (CompUSA ) and fooled around on the Macs that were sitting out, when I realized that things such as minimizing (genie effect) and the likes were so much smoother on all of their machines than mine. I have a 15" PB G4 1.5Ghz with 1.5GB RAM and even the Mac Mini 1.25Ghz with 512MB RAM and a 32MB video card was smooth as could be.

It's not that my machine is slow, it just doesn't have that "new Mac" smoothness to it.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Is there anything I can do?

EDIT: I even used my identical machine there (with 512MB RAM, by the way) and it was just like the rest of them.

 

[Revlimit Punk]

I guess it's normal. You might be keeping up tasks in the background in the machine that you own. They might be light on the processor usage by themselves but when you begin piling up those background tasks, they start to add some latency in whatever you are running, quartz effects included.
My machine skips 2d animation frames too compared to some demo machines i find in computer stores, and it's not what i would call slow, it's a dual G5 2.5Ghz.

 

[boredinroom4]

thats kindia weird since it was pretty smooth on a G3 i put panther on a few years ago....

 

[someguy]

Still a problem, if anyone has any idea of something I could try.

We just bought a new Intel iMac and I am reminded of just how smooth the genie effect used to be...

 

[KD7IWP]

Forgive me if this is the obvious common thing to say. But I was wondering what would happen if you created a new user account and tried that. I don't think permissions would do anything with this, but it could be one of your preference files perhaps. I know new accounts fix lots of problems for me now and then. I used to have that same Powerbook and the effects worked just great.

 

[someguy]

Well, I found if I Quit everything in Activity Monitor (except for like 4 or 5 items that need to be running in order for the OS to work...) then it is almost as smooth as it was when I got it, but I'm usually only running 5 or 6 apps at once (with 1.5GB RAM, this should not make a difference), so what the hell?

New user account acts the same way just so long as I close almost everything...

 

[calebjohnston]

I find having more than one browser installed slows down my mac's minimizing/effects. Try removing other browsers besides safari, restarting, and then see.

 

[7on]

I find having more than one browser installed slows down my mac's minimizing/effects. Try removing other browsers besides safari, restarting, and then see.

weird... any certain browser? Because having a file reside on your hdd shouldn't affect your machine's speed unless it was running.

 

[calebjohnston]

Yeah, it was very strange. It was actually on my iBook that I don't have anymore. No problems on my PB.

I would download firefox/camino in addition to Safari and it would just make all the transitions very chunky. Strange.

 

[someguy]

Yeah, it was very strange. It was actually on my iBook that I don't have anymore. No problems on my PB.

I would download firefox/camino in addition to Safari and it would just make all the transitions very chunky. Strange.

Funny, I have Safari, Firefox, and Camino on my PB. Can I move them to the Trash temporarily to see if that fixes it or do they have to be completely removed from the Trash as well?

 

[macOSX-tastic]

i too have noticed this......but dashboard zooming was very jittery on the powermac that i was playing with at regent street the other day.



S

 

[calebjohnston]

I had to remove all the other browsers completely and then re-start. It's a pain, but it's worth a shot.

 

[VanNess]

Still a problem, if anyone has any idea of something I could try.

We just bought a new Intel iMac and I am reminded of just how smooth the genie effect used to be...

If you're running your computer 24/7, you might try restarting or just logging out and in again. My guess is that your video card's memory is getting overdosed, staying full, and not releasing anything. If your are also paging out to disk from main memory, that might make matters worse. Restarting or logging out should flush the video card memory, and all of the animations should be very smooth at that point.

Newer Macs with 64 meg and greater memory capacity probably don't see the problem as often as 32 meg and lower cards. But something tells me that all of that dashboarding, minimizing, exposeing, slide shows, and other open-gl based stuff in the OS starts taking a toll after awhile. I've noticed it from time to time and I've noticed that logging out always makes it butter-smooth™ again

 

[FocusAndEarnIt]

Hmmm, I just reinstalled the OS on my iBook (needed it bad) and everything is like new!

I don't recommend this to fix the problem, but I wanted to do a clean install, I had a ton of crap and I just needed to reinstall. And, now I feel everything is just... snappier.

 

[someguy]

If you're running your computer 24/7, you might try restarting or just logging out and in again. My guess is that your video card's memory is getting overdosed, staying full, and not releasing anything. If your are also paging out to disk from main memory, that might make matters worse. Restarting or logging out should flush the video card memory, and all of the animations should be very smooth at that point.

Newer Macs with 64 meg and greater memory capacity probably don't see the problem as often as 32 meg and lower cards. But something tells me that all of that dashboarding, minimizing, exposeing, slide shows, and other open-gl based stuff in the OS starts taking a toll after awhile. I've noticed it from time to time and I've noticed that logging out always makes it butter-smooth™ again

I power off and on every single day. I don't think I've had an uptime of more than 3 days since I bought this machine new. Also, it has 64MB video.

 

[VanNess]

I power off and on every single day. I don't think I've had an uptime of more than 3 days since I bought this machine new. Also, it has 64MB video.

Well, so much for that theory then. The only other thing I can think of is to check activity monitor when you notice a slowdown with effects and see of anything is eating up your CPU. All the quartz extreme-provided effects seem to be fine on my system - it rarely feels like it's choked or not smooth. And mine has less horsepower than yours and I leave it on pretty much all the time. So maybe some process on your set-up is interfering with the open-gl based finder eye-candy

 

[Eidorian]

I occasionally notice slow minimizing but that's due to a high CPU load. I'd suggest getting more RAM as the first thing. I have a 9000 Pro w/64 MB running dual 17" Dell LCD's and Exposé and minimizing are smooth like butter. Then again I have 1.5 GB of RAM in it.

I watch videos and use Safari under Reduced power settings on my iMac G5 and the effects are still perfect.

 

[mkrishnan]

Restarting or logging out should flush the video card memory, and all of the animations should be very smooth at that point.

So the video card memory is also susceptible to memory leak issues? *pouts*

Well, ahem, at least, thank you for teaching me something. That would certainly explain why everyone thinks Safari is snappier™ after a security update!

Are you sure logging out would help, without an actual reboot?

 

[someguy]

Well, so much for that theory then. The only other thing I can think of is to check activity monitor when you notice a slowdown with effects and see of anything is eating up your CPU. All the quartz extreme-provided effects seem to be fine on my system - it rarely feels like it's choked or not smooth. And mine has less horsepower than yours and I leave it on pretty much all the time. So maybe some process on your set-up is interfering with the open-gl based finder eye-candy

I have a CPU Usage item in my menubar and even when idling at 0-2% the minimizing effects drop like every other frame so that it looks very jittery on its way down to the dock.

I occasionally notice slow minimizing but that's due to a high CPU load. I'd suggest getting more RAM as the first thing. I have a 9000 Pro w/64 MB running dual 17" Dell LCD's and Exposé and minimizing are smooth like butter. Then again I have 1.5 GB of RAM in it.

Well, like I said above, the animations aren't slower than they should be, just jittery. There is definitely some frame loss going on for some reason. I even noticed it on the Intel iMac today!!! Then I restarted that machine and all was well again, but what's going on with my PB?

 

[calebjohnston]

Did you try removing the browsers like I said? It's worth a shot.

 

[someguy]

Did you try removing the browsers like I said? It's worth a shot.

I did. It didn't help on my PB, but I removed Firefox from the iMac and it cleared up after a reboot. I think it was the reboot that fixed the issue, because wouldn't the uninstallation of Firefox need not a reboot to see the affects?

Either way, didn't help the 'book.

 

[someguy]

What I don't get is that all other effects and 2D animations, etc. work just fine. The ripple effect in Dashboard, the Finder window when you double-click the HD icon on the desktop, the screensavers/slideshows motion is smooth, even Expose! It doesn't make sense that all 3 minimize effects look jittery like this.

 

[someguy]

Ran TinkerTool and just for kicks, restarted the Dock. Minimize effects officially smooth as can be.

But for how long...

And what would this have to do with anything?

 

[someguy]

Sorry for all the posts, but I'm getting somewhere with this, lol.

OK, relaunch the Dock in TinkerTool and all is well. Run tons of programs and the problem remains cleared up, so it's not a CPU or RAM issue.

Log out, log back in. Problem returned, even without opening anything.

Can any Mac guru or genious put these clues together and make some sense of this for me? I know very little about the Mac OS, but maybe someone can shed some light on this for me? I'd really like to not have to relaunch the Dock all the time.

Oh, and just for the sake of trying it, I put my machine to sleep for a minute or so, then woke it back up and the problem did NOT come back... if that means anything to anyone.

EDIT: Also, I drastically reduced the number of icons on my Dock, which had no effect on this situation. I think this is relevant, though, because if restarting the Dock fixes the problem (temporarily, even), then the problem is probably Dock-related, no?

 

[VanNess]

So the video card memory is also susceptible to memory leak issues? *pouts*

Well, ahem, at least, thank you for teaching me something. That would certainly explain why everyone thinks Safari is snappier™ after a security update!

Are you sure logging out would help, without an actual reboot?

I don't know for a fact that video card memory is susceptible to leaks, but it's memory, ram, and it's finite just like regular system ram except no VM that I'm aware of. I'm inclined to think that OS X manages video memory just fine when it comes to OS X eye candy effects and window drawing (i.e., quartz extreme), but other opengl-based apps, games, et al., may not be so clean sharing video memory with OS X. And then there is also the issue of drivers, which OS X seemed to be getting fresh ones on just about every update until recently.

I've never had a significant problem with the effects, but for what it's worth, if I left my machine on 24/7 with marathon use for a long period of time - and then logged out and in, dock magnification seemed smoother and to a lesser extent, window minimization. It's really splitting hairs on the difference, though. Hiding the dock was probably the most noticeable. It seemed that over time that effect got progressively jerkier, but logging out and in never failed to restore it back to as-new, as well as ultra-smooth dock magnification and window minimization.

These days I hardly ever notice it. In any event, logging out and in is an excellent way of resetting things (including clearing memory) without having to reload the OS.

By the way, I discovered long ago that just saying Safari out loud makes it snappier.

OK, relaunch the Dock in TinkerTool and all is well. Run tons of programs and the problem remains cleared up, so it's not a CPU or RAM issue.

Log out, log back in. Problem returned, even without opening anything.

I think this is relevant, though, because if restarting the Dock fixes the problem (temporarily, even), then the problem is probably Dock-related, no?

Okay, first why don't you post what's in your login items tab in the accounts pane of system preferences.

Second, have you ever modified the dock in any way, such as enchancers like clear dock (I think that's what it's called) or similar?